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Fort Smith Tries To Woo State Veterans Home Panel

Fort Smith Tries To Woo State Veterans Home Panel

CHAD HUNTER • TIMES RECORD Veterans Gordon and Laurel Kidd, along with veteran Joe Beauchesne and Debi Rivera, hold signs Monday, Aug. 19, 2013, at Chaffee Crossing to welcome a panel charged with deciding where a new state veterans home should be located.

“I would love to see this veterans home come here,” Sebastian County Justice of the Peace Danny Aldridge said. “We’ve got a history of supporting military going back hundreds of years. We’re the ideal place. We’re the perfect fit.”

“When it comes to our military folks and veterans, you will not find a community any more supportive, dedicated, caring and concerned for our active military and for our veterans,” Fort Smith Mayor Sandy Sanders told the task force. “You probably know Fort Smith was founded as a military outpost.”

The Legislature created the task force during this year’s legislative session to help plan for a new veterans home to replace an old facility in Little Rock that was closed last year after failing building and health code inspections. The task force has until the end of October to make a recommendation to legislators.

The proposed site in Fort Smith is on 25 acres at Chaffee Crossing next to the planned Interstate 49 route and existing major roadways connecting to Barling, Greenwood and Van Buren. It is near the Chaffee Historic District and museums and adjacent to Camp Hope for Heroes, a service facility for veterans. The Fort Chaffee Redevelopment Authority proposed the site.

“What an exciting time and what an exciting place Chaffee Crossing is,” developer Rocky Walker told the panel. “I love the Fort Smith area. I’ve been here all my life. Chaffee Crossing is the place to be. The electricity, you can feel it in the air.”

About a dozen representatives of the 22-member task force toured the Chaffee Crossing site. They were greeted by residents, some veterans, waving signs shaped like puzzle pieces touting Chaffee Crossing as “the perfect fit” for the veterans home.

“My father was a veteran,” said Tammy Fujibayashi, with Cre8ive Arts Network, a nonprofit studio headquartered at Chaffee Crossing. “He was out here. We’ve all got some kind of tie to Chaffee. They had a hard time finding places to retire and get help 10 to 15 years ago. I just want to see them taken better care of.”

In attendance was state Sen. Jane English, R-North Little Rock, chairwoman of the veterans home task force. English was the first director of the Fort Chaffee Redevelopment Authority in 1997.

“She preceded all of us,” FCRA Executive Director Ivy Owen said, “and set the stage for Mayor Sanders to become the director in 2001 and me in 2007.”

English described the task force members as “folks who basically came on their own dime and their own time.”

“We really think this is an important public service,” English said. “We had about 30 communities that submitted proposals for this new veterans home. Three of our members went through all of those proposals and chose four sites.”

Task force members were scheduled to visit Russellville later Monday.

“We were sitting in your position a few years ago,” said Richard Turner with firearms company Umarex, located at Chaffee Crossing. “We were looking to relocate our North American headquarters. Now that we stand back four years later, we could not have envisioned a better team of people to work with, a flawless process and a can-do attitude.”